


Evil Stepmother

by wanderingstoryteller



Series: No one ever said this life would be simple [23]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Ethics, F/F, Military dictatorship, Shiva Has a Lot of Mommies, Time Daughters, Time Teenagers, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 13:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17982074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingstoryteller/pseuds/wanderingstoryteller
Summary: The Doctor and Team Tardis accidentally land on a planet controlled by a totalitarian regime. It turns out that the the military dictator is actually Missy's ex-wife. While Shiva wants to catch up with her ex-stepmother, the Doctor has a very hard time not starting a revolution.





	Evil Stepmother

**Author's Note:**

> Usually I combine shorter works like this into bundles of three or so but this one didn't fit with anything else I'm working on, so I decided to post it as a stand alone. Enjoy.

Shiva seemed very surprised when she stepped from the TARDIS into a beautiful public square. It rather reminded the Doctor of Trafalgar Square in London, complete with a large central column, although there appeared to be a statue of a starship instead of a man with a big hat on top. It was crowded with fairly ordinary looking human variants dressed in dull colors going about their business and a truly terrifying number of pigeons. No one knew how, but somehow pigeons had managed to spread to the stars with humanity.

Shiva ran after the Doctor, who was already several feet from the TARDIS and grabbed her arm. “We can’t be here, Mom said I wasn’t supposed to ever come back here.”

Just as suddenly the Doctor caught a flash of movement on a rooftop. A quick survey of the square told her that snipers were hurrying into position.

“Get back in the TARDIS,” She hissed at Shiva, shoving her behind herself, back towards Yaz and the others. A bullet suddenly thudded into the ground cutting all of them off from getting back into the safety range of the TARDIS’s shields.

“Freeze, step away from the vehicle,” boomed a young woman in a rather fascist inspired black uniform as she strode across the square with an armed guard at her heels. She managed to stomp her jackboots with impressive menace. She became very confused when she got close enough to see them properly, as if expecting to see someone who wasn’t there.

Shiva didn’t miss a beat, “Code Alpha, Delta Ninera Apple. Take me to Supreme Leader General Josephine Tate at once.”

“That code is no longer valid,” snapped the woman in uniform.

“All the same, take me and my friends to Josephine Tate. My stepmom will want to see me.”

“You’ll go where I tell you. Where is your mother?”

“Which one?”

“Don’t play with me child.”

“Missy isn’t with me but she knows I’m here,” said Shiva half truthfully.

“We’ll see about that, you're coming with me. Don’t make a scene,” funny words coming from someone who had just stormed across a crowded square with an armed escort. She snapped her fingers and suddenly guards were rushing at them from all sides. “Grab them, take anything that’s in their pockets, especially if it looks like a screwdriver.”

“Don’t fight them, go along with it,” Shiva hissed at her friends. “Josephine won’t let them hurt me.”

They didn’t have much hope of fighting anyway, they were badly outnumbered. Just as their commander had ordered, the guards did indeed cuff them and start rummaging their pockets. When the Doctor’s coat began to quickly yield an almost endless supply of odds and ends, ranging from her sonic, to jelly babies, to sonic paper, to condoms, to a dreidel, they gave up and uncuffed her long enough to take the whole coat. They also took Shiva’s gun, Grahams emergency energy bars, Ryans gameboy, and Yaz’s extra hair ties before marching them across the square and shoving them into the back of a windowless hover van..

A short ride brought them to an underground car park. They were rapidly ushered up a set of stairs straight through dark and then increasingly ornate hallways. Soon enough it seemed as if they were passing through what the halls of the palace of Versailles would have looked like if a military dictatorship had taken over immediately after the revolution. The ceilings were obscenely ornate and covered in stucco while the carpet was grey, the walls were bare, and all the furniture was metal, cheap and utilitarian. No attempt had been made to conceal any of the communication or power boxes on the walls and modern wiring ran across everything.

Their guards pushed open a huge pair of ornate wooden doors into a large office. Windows dominated an entire wall looking down into an ornate state garden while a huge wooden desk piled high with papers and tablets sat at the very center.

A greying dark haired woman with a neat military haircut and a patch over one eyes sat there. She wore a very similar uniform to the first woman, save that there different insignia on the right breast, She looked up when they entered and was then on her feet in an instant, closing the distance in a few strides.

“Shiva!” She reached out as if to embrace the girl and then realized she was cuffed. “Why are her hands bound? Free her at once.”

One of the guards quickly uncuffed Shiva, who rubbed at her wrists and shot the woman from the square a gloating glare.

The one with the eye patch hugged her briefly and gave her a quick glance over. “You’ve gotten so tall. How old are you now, thirteen?”

“Fifteen,” said Shiva as if slightly offended at being thought younger.

That seemed to confuse the woman but she shrugged it off. “Is everything alright? Why are you back? Where is your mother?”

“Missy’s off somewhere else.”

The woman from the square cut in. “I’m not so sure of that General Tate. That blond woman had a sonic device in her coat and she scanned as having two hearts.”

The General turned sharply to look at the Doctor. “Missy?”

“I’m not Missy.”

“Don’t play games with me, you owe me that much after what you did.”

“No seriously, I’m the Doctor not the Mistress.”

General Tate stalked closer, she was significantly taller than the Doctor and used that to her advantage. “You told me yourself that Time Lords regenerate. Do you think you can fool me with a pretty new face and a different title?”

“Josephine,” said Shiva sounding aggravated, “She’s really not Missy. The Doctor is my gene mom.”

She still didn’t look convinced. She narrowed her eyes and then caught the Doctor’s chin in her hands so she could force her to hold her gaze. “Pomegranate.”

When she didn’t see what she was looking for in the Doctor’s eyes she released her. “You’re telling the truth, forgive me,” to the guards she said, “Uncuff all of them.”

As soon as the Doctor’s hands were free, the general offered her hand. “General Josephine Tate, It seems we have both had the ill luck of loving the same woman.”

“Missy’s not that bad, really, much nicer now than she used to be when she was a blond man.”

“She tried to nuke an entire lunar colony when it rebelled from Orwellan. I may be a military dictator but I draw the line at murdering millions from orbit.”

“That does sound like her.”

“When I stopped her, she tried to seize power from me, had apparently had a secret contingency plan to do so all along.”

“Also like her.”

“And she tried to poison me in the process.”

“Very much like her.”

“And she stole my dog.”

“Er, that bit is not like her at all actually.”

“Um, I’m actually the one that did that,” admitted Shiva. “Mom said I could only take one thing when we fled.”

The general looked genuinely betrayed, “ _You_ took Lord Nelson?”

“I really loved him.”  

Her face softened, “how is the old boy?”

“Died last year, his heart gave out.”

“I suppose german shepherds don’t live that long.”  She seemed to suddenly remember herself. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you, but why are you back and who are your other friends?”

Shiva happily made introductions. “This is my new evil stepmother, Yaz, she’s the Doctor’s girlfriend.”

“Not evil,” insisted Yaz. “Technically not her stepmother either.”

“And this is Ryan, he’s good at video games. Graham is his grandad, he’s nice even if he likes boring TV shows about childbirth. We all travel with the Doctor in her TARDIS, unfortunately she’s as a bad a pilot as Mom.”

General Tate’s eyebrows rose slightly at the last statement. “Did you crash land?”

“Nah. We didn’t crash, the TARDIS just didn’t go where we told it to,” To her friends she explained. “When Mom and I first came here she missed a jump around a star and the Byzantium Batteries were depleted and we had to wait a year while they recharged. We got brought in for questioning because we were weird time traveling aliens who’d crashed a red phone box into the main column of Victory Square. That’s how Mom met Josephine. Mom talked Josephine into letting her help her put down a popular uprising and the next thing you know they got married a few months later.”

“Which reminds me, when you see your mother again, tell her I’ve divorced her. Also I have changed all the nuclear launch codes, so she better not get any bright ideas. If she ever shows her face on any Orwellan held territory again I will have her shot.”

“Will do.”

 

…

 

Shiva spent most of the afternoon catching up with her former stepmother while the Doctor and the rest went off to explore they city. The Doctor was initially hesitant to let her daughter out of her sight but Shiva’s repeated insistence that it was fine eventually won her over. Their things had been given back and Shiva again had her wrist strap, phone, and gun, so she was far from helpless.

It was a bit tricky to explore much with two armed guards in tow but they managed. That jackbooted woman from the square turned out to be named Sergeant Grey. She was as uninspiring at the named implied. She tried very, very hard to get the Doctor and the others to stick with seeing the cities monuments and imperial war museum. She also apparently really liked talking about the history of space battles to the point she managed to bore even the other guard to tears.

Of course the moment they stumbled into a street protest the Doctor and her friends managed to lose both their guards. Soon enough they’d made friends with some rebels and not long after they were utterly caught up in things. The Doctor may or may not have helped a group called the Mothers of the Disappeared hack into a government computer system and find out what had happened to their missing family members.

Not unsurprisingly, nothing good had happened to anyone who’d been dragged off in the middle of the night with a bag over their head. The Doctor might also have helped the rebels take over the planet's public broadcasting system and share what they’d learned.

That led to the largest protest march the capital city of Orwellan had ever seen. The Doctor and the others were watching everything with a deep sense of contentment from a side street when their guards caught up with them ]and they had brought enforcement.

This time they weren’t brought to the nice office with the big windows. They were thrown cuffed into a grimy dark cell that smelled of every horrid thing imaginable.

It wasn’t long before the door was flung open. Shiva’s frantic voice drifted in.

“Please, she’s my mom, they’re my friends. You can’t hurt them. Please I’m begging you.”

“They started a popular uprising. If they were anyone but your people, I’d have already had them tortured and shot. What am I supposed to do with them?” answered General Tate, arms crossed as she frowned at the girl.

“Just let us go. Punishing them won’t stop the rebellion.”

“Why? If I do that, how do I know they won’t come back and cause more trouble.”

“Because you have my word.”

“That isn’t enough.”

“My gene mom will give hers as well.”

“Your birth mother lied as easily as she breathed, why would I believe your other one?”

“Because she’s different. Please, if you ever cared about me, just let us go.”

The general was clearly wavering, “Of course I care about you Shiva. You were my step daughter for three years. I gave you your first rifle”

“And taught you how to be a much better shot than Mom ever could.”

“For a woman with such a love of deadly things, your mom always did have terrible aim,” there was so much fondness in her voice. She let out a breath. “Alright Shiva, I need to go deal with the protests before they get any worse, I don’t have time to keep arguing with you. For your sake, and your sake alone, I’ll let you take the Doctor and her friends and go.”

Shiva looked up at the general, she seemed not quite as tall as she remembered her, funny how growing a bit taller could change her perspective on the world. “And never come back I suppose?”

Josephine reached out to press her shoulder. “For all your visit may have cost me, I’m still glad to have seen you again. You are as close to a daughter as I will ever have and you are always welcome to come back, but only if you come alone.”

“I understand.”

“Then go. The protesters are moving towards Victory Square, you won’t have a clear shot at the TARDIS much longer.

“Thank you.” And though she wasn’t much of a hugger, Shiva still briefly embraced the general before she went to collect her companions.

 

…

 

They had barely finished hopping back into the void before Shiva began yelling at the Doctor.

“Why! Just for once in your damn noble life could you have let things go? Just once?”

The Doctor let go of the knob she was pulling and turned to look at her distressed daughter.

“The Mothers of Disappeared needed my help.”  

“People always need your help! What about what I need? Couldn’t you have just played tourist for one day and let me visit my step-mom?”

“Shiva,” said Graham gently. “If you’d seen the records we did. I think you would understand why the Doc did what she did.”

“I don’t care.” She crossed her arms, falling into full sulky teenager stance.

“The files listed the way each disappeared person was tortured, and how they were executed and what they did with the bodies,” Ryan looked more than a bit ill.

Shiva slumped against the railing as if she’d been slapped. “I don’t...I don’t want to know that.”

“Shiva,” the Doctor made the mistake of trying to hug her. Shiva seldom, if ever, accepted unsolicited physical affection, especially when she was angry.

The young Time Lady threw up her hands in the air. “I get it, okay I get it. Josephine’s evil and you don’t like her, so what, so is Mom!”

“Your mother isn’t evil,” said the Doctor. She had encountered very few things that were actually evil, although she had.

Yaz wasn’t completely decided on that matter but she had the good sense not to comment.

“You still think she’s a bad person. Whenever I do anything the way she taught me to, you always say its wrong. You don’t want me to kill or steal or even lie.”

“She and I have very different approaches to ethics. She avoids them, I’m rather attached to some.”

“Well you know what?” her arms were crossed again, the scowl back. “I don’t want to be good like you, not all the time. I’ll kill if I have to, to protect myself and those I love. I’ll steal when I need to and I do lie sometimes, even to you.”

A lot of things warred across the Doctor’s face but in the end she settled on a gentle smile. “okay.”

“Okay?”

“Everything you’ve just said is okay. You're old enough to have your own ethics. If I ever made you think that you had to be just like me, or not like your mother at all, I’m sorry.”  

Shiva looked a bit like the wind had been taken out of her sails. “You really mean that?”

“Yes, although I can’t promise I won’t still try to tell you what to do sometimes, I am your mom.”

Shiva considered that. “Okay then.”

And that was the end of it at least for the time being.

They hopped back to Sheffield and got fish and chips. They ate them in a small park that had only about a 50/50 trash to grass ratio. Shiva and Ryan threw their extra chips to the ancient ancestors of the pigeons they’d seen earlier that day until a red phone box whooped into a parking space and Missy came to collect her daughter.


End file.
